“Liborio” invites viewers to the birth of a religion and asks them if they would believe. Based on a historical figure, albeit one with the dimensions of a folk hero, “Liborio” is set in the countryside of the Dominican Republic in the early 20th century. After being lost in a torrential storm and thought dead, a man (Vicente Santos) is found alive days later. He informs his community he has been to heaven and returned with a message to save the people. He is reborn as Liborio.
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While his resurrection occurs earlier in his story, Liborio is a remarkably Christ-like figure whose profile in his community grows with a series of miracles, such as saving a child. Liborio preaches a simple and positive creed—out with the evil and in with the good—to his rural followers. He is a benevolent leader, never trying to fight, but only to keep his community fed. Despite this, like Christ, he eventually runs afoul of the powers that be through little fault of his own, with the United States Marines playing the part of the Romans.
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“Liborio” is the feature directing debut of Nino Martínez Sosa, a Dominican-born Spaniard with extensive experience as a film editor. While the story of Liborio could be interpreted into a variety of genres, Sosa’s priority with the film isn’t plot or politics as much as putting viewers into the heads of Liborio’s followers. As in the Gospels, the story isn’t told in the prophet’s words but through the eyes of various followers. Over and over, we see characters gaze at Liborio, the dance of faith and doubt in their eyes, trying to decide whether or not they’re witnessing the miraculous.
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Sosa and director of photography Óscar Durán do an excellent job of conjuring the physical world of Liborio and his followers, dominated by nature and the jungle, which has an almost tactile presence in the film. Liborio doesn’t win followers with any intellectual appeals; he is a man of actions, examples, and few words. His faith seems to be almost a physical feeling, channeled in the stirring drum music that praises his name throughout the film. As Liborio, Santos is an imposing physical presence who manages to be charismatic while, again like Christ, keeping his emotional life mostly remote, despite finding a partner and having a child during the course of the film. The viewer instead feels the emotions of his witnesses, reckoning with the pressure to believe, and once they do believe, with what this means for their lives.
“Liborio” is a beguiling film for the spiritually minded, with fascinating parallels to early Christianity, allowing the audience to question what they might do confronted with a messiah and also how that story might be shaped afterward. Reaching towards the transcendent style, Sosa has taken this symbol of hope and resistance for Dominicans and made a moving drama of belief. [B+]